OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Contrastive Retrieval Heads Improve Attention-Based Re-Ranking
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

The strong zero-shot and long-context capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for highly effective re-ranking systems. Attention-based re-rankers leverage attention weights from transformer heads to produce relevance scores, but not all heads are created equally: many contribute noise and redundancy, thus limiting performance. To address this, we introduce CoRe heads, a small set of retrieval heads identified via a contrastive scoring metric that explicitly rewards high attention heads that correlate with relevant documents, while downplaying nodes with higher attention that correlate with irrelevant documents. This relative ranking criterion isolates the most discriminative heads for re-ranking and yields a state-of-the-art list-wise re-ranker. Extensive experiments with three LLMs show that aggregated signals from CoRe heads, constituting less than 1% of all heads, substantially improve re-ranking accuracy over strong baselines. We further find that CoRe heads are concentrated in middle layers, and pruning the computation of final 50% of model layers preserves accuracy while significantly reducing inference time and memory usage.
VideoNSA: Native Sparse Attention Scales Video Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Video understanding in multimodal language models remains limited by context length: models often miss key transition frames and struggle to maintain coherence across long time scales. To address this, we adapt Native Sparse Attention (NSA) to video-language models. Our method, VideoNSA, adapts Qwen2.5-VL through end-to-end training on a 216K video instruction dataset. We employ a hardware-aware hybrid approach to attention, preserving dense attention for text, while employing NSA for video. Compared to token-compression and training-free sparse baselines, VideoNSA achieves improved performance on long-video understanding, temporal reasoning, and spatial benchmarks. Further ablation analysis reveals four key findings: (1) reliable scaling to 128K tokens; (2) an optimal global-local attention allocation at a fixed budget; (3) task-dependent branch usage patterns; and (4) the learnable combined sparse attention help induce dynamic attention sinks. Project Page: https://enxinsong.com/VideoNSA-web/, Code: https://github.com/Espere-1119-Song/VideoNSA
AutoContext: Instance-Level Context Learning for LLM Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Current LLM agents typically lack instance-level context, which comprises concrete facts such as environment structure, system configurations, and local mechanics. Consequently, existing methods are forced to intertwine exploration with task execution. This coupling leads to redundant interactions and fragile decision-making, as agents must repeatedly rediscover the same information for every new task. To address this, we introduce AutoContext, a method that decouples exploration from task solving. AutoContext performs a systematic, one-off exploration to construct a reusable knowledge graph for each environment instance. This structured context allows off-the-shelf agents to access necessary facts directly, eliminating redundant exploration. Experiments across TextWorld, ALFWorld, Crafter, and InterCode-Bash demonstrate substantial gains: for example, the success rate of a ReAct agent on TextWorld improves from 37% to 95%, highlighting the critical role of structured instance context in efficient agentic systems.
F-scheduler: illuminating the free-lunch design space for fast sampling of diffusion models
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2026
Year: 2026

Diffusion models are the state-of-the-art generative models for high-resolution images, but sampling from pretrained models is computationally expensive, motivating interest in fast sampling. Although Free-U Net is a training-free enhancement for improving image quality, we find it ineffective under few-step ($<10$) sampling. We analyze the discrete diffusion ODE and propose F-scheduler, a scheduler designed for ODE solvers with Free-U Net. Our proposed scheduler consists of a special time schedule that does not fully denoise the feature to enable the use of the KL-term in the $β$-VAE decoder, and the schedule of a proper inference stage for modifying the U-Net skip-connection via Free-U Net. Via information theory, we provide insights into how the better scheduled ODE solvers for the diffusion model can outperform the training-based diffusion distillation model. The newly proposed scheduler is compatible with most of the few-step ODE solvers and can sample a 1024 x 1024-resolution image in 6 steps and a 512 x 512-resolution image in 5 steps when it applies to DPM++ 2m and UniPC, with an FID result that outperforms the SOTA distillation models and the 20-step DPM++ 2m solver, respectively. Codebase: https://github.com/TheLovesOfLadyPurple/F-scheduler
Dynamic Target Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks typically optimize an adversarial suffix to induce a fixed affirmative response, e.g., ``Sure, here is...''. However, this fixed target usually resides in an extremely low-density region of a safety-aligned LLM's output distribution. Due to the substantial discrepancy between the fixed target and the output distribution, existing attacks require numerous iterations to optimize the adversarial prompt, which might still fail to induce the low-probability target response. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Target Attack (DTA), which leverages the target LLM's own responses as adaptive targets. In each optimization round, DTA samples multiple candidates from the output distribution conditioned on the current prompt, and selects the most harmful one as a temporary target for prompt optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under the white-box setting, DTA achieves over 87% average attack success rate (ASR) within 200 optimization iterations on recent safety-aligned LLMs, exceeding the state-of-the-art baselines by over 15% and reducing wall-clock time by 2-26x. Under the black-box setting, DTA employs a white-box LLM as a surrogate model for gradient-based optimization, achieving an average ASR of 77.5% against black-box models, exceeding prior transfer-based attacks by over 12%.
The Log-Rank Conjecture: New Equivalent Formulations
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2026
Year: 2026

The log-rank conjecture is a longstanding open problem with multiple equivalent formulations in complexity theory and mathematics. In its linear-algebraic form, it asserts that the rank and partitioning number of a Boolean matrix are quasi-polynomially related. We propose a relaxed but still equivalent version of the conjecture based on a new matrix parameter, signed rectangle rank: the minimum number of all-1 rectangles needed to express the Boolean matrix as a $\pm 1$-sum. Signed rectangle rank lies between rank and partition number, and our main result shows that it is in fact equivalent to rank up to a logarithmic factor. Additionally, we extend the main result to tensors. This reframes the log-rank conjecture as: can every signed decomposition of a Boolean matrix be made positive with only quasi-polynomial blowup? As an application, we prove an equivalence between the log-rank conjecture and a conjecture of Lovett and Singer-Sudan on cross-intersecting set systems.
Less LLM, More Documents: Searching for Improved RAG
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) couples document retrieval with large language models (LLMs). While scaling generators often improves accuracy, it also increases inference and deployment overhead. We study an orthogonal axis: enlarging the retriever's corpus, and how it trades off with generator scale. Across multiple open-domain QA benchmarks, corpus scaling consistently strengthens RAG and can in many cases match the gains of moving to a larger model tier, though with diminishing returns at larger scales. Small- and mid-sized generators paired with larger corpora often rival much larger models with smaller corpora; mid-sized models tend to gain the most, while tiny and very large models benefit less. Our analysis suggests that these improvements arise primarily from increased coverage of answer-bearing passages, while utilization efficiency remains largely unchanged. Overall, our results characterize a corpus-generator trade-off in RAG and provide empirical guidance on how corpus scale and model capacity interact in this setting.
Fostering Collective Discourse: A Distributed Role-Based Approach to Online News Commenting
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Current news commenting systems are designed based on implicitly individualistic assumptions, where discussion is the result of a series of disconnected opinions. This often results in fragmented and polarized conversations that fail to represent the spectrum of public discourse. In this work, we develop a news commenting system where users take on distributed roles to collaboratively structure the comments to encourage a connected, balanced discussion space. Through a within-subject, mixed-methods evaluation (N=38), we find that the system supported three stages of participation: understanding issues, collaboratively structuring comments, and building a discussion. With our system, users' comments displayed more balanced perspectives and a more emotionally neutral argumentation. Simultaneously, we observed reduced argument strength compared to a traditional commenting system, indicating a trade-off between inclusivity and depth. We conclude with design considerations and trade-offs for introducing distributed roles in news commenting system design.
The Curious Case of In-Training Compression of State Space Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

State Space Models (SSMs), developed to tackle long sequence modeling tasks efficiently, offer both parallelizable training and fast inference. At their core are recurrent dynamical systems that maintain a hidden state, with update costs scaling with the state dimension. A key design challenge is striking the right balance between maximizing expressivity and limiting this computational burden. Control theory, and more specifically Hankel singular value analysis, provides a potent framework for the measure of energy for each state, as well as the balanced truncation of the original system down to a smaller representation with performance guarantees. Leveraging the eigenvalue stability properties of Hankel matrices, we apply this lens to SSMs \emph{during training}, where only dimensions of high influence are identified and preserved. Our approach, \textsc{CompreSSM}, applies to Linear Time-Invariant SSMs such as Linear Recurrent Units, but is also extendable to selective models. Experiments show that in-training reduction significantly accelerates optimization while preserving expressivity, with compressed models retaining task-critical structure lost by models trained directly at smaller dimension. In other words, SSMs that begin large and shrink during training achieve computational efficiency while maintaining higher performance. Project code is available at github.com/camail-official/compressm.
PyRadiomics-cuda: 3D features extraction from medical images for HPC using GPU acceleration
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2026
Year: 2026

PyRadiomics-cuda is a GPU-accelerated extension of the PyRadiomics library, designed to address the computational challenges of extracting three-dimensional shape features from medical images. By offloading key geometric computations to GPU hardware it dramatically reduces processing times for large volumetric datasets. The system maintains full compatibility with the original PyRadiomics API, enabling seamless integration into existing AI workflows without code modifications. This transparent acceleration facilitates efficient, scalable radiomics analysis, supporting rapid feature extraction essential for high-throughput AI pipeline. Tests performed on a typical computational cluster, budget and home devices prove usefulness in all scenarios.
Lightweight Transformer for EEG Classification via Balanced Signed Graph Algorithm Unrolling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Samples of brain signals collected by EEG sensors have inherent anti-correlations that are well modeled by negative edges in a finite graph. To differentiate epilepsy patients from healthy subjects using collected EEG signals, we build lightweight and interpretable transformer-like neural nets by unrolling a spectral denoising algorithm for signals on a balanced signed graph -- graph with no cycles of odd number of negative edges. A balanced signed graph has well-defined frequencies that map to a corresponding positive graph via similarity transform of the graph Laplacian matrices. We implement an ideal low-pass filter efficiently on the mapped positive graph via Lanczos approximation, where the optimal cutoff frequency is learned from data. Given that two balanced signed graph denoisers learn posterior probabilities of two different signal classes during training, we evaluate their reconstruction errors for binary classification of EEG signals. Experiments show that our method achieves classification performance comparable to representative deep learning schemes, while employing dramatically fewer parameters.
From Text to Alpha: Can LLMs Track Evolving Signals in Corporate Disclosures?
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2026
Year: 2026

Natural language processing (NLP) has been widely used in quantitative finance, but traditional methods often struggle to capture rich narratives in corporate disclosures, leaving potentially informative signals under-explored. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative due to their ability to extract nuanced semantics. In this paper, we ask whether semantic signals extracted by LLMs from corporate disclosures predict alpha, defined as abnormal returns beyond broad market movements and common risk factors. We introduce a simple framework, LLM as extractor, embedding as ruler, which extracts context-aware, metric-focused textual spans and quantifies semantic changes across consecutive disclosure periods using embedding-based similarity. This allows us to measure the degree of metric shifting -- how much firms move away from previously emphasized metrics, referred as moving targets. In experiments with portfolio and cross-sectional regression tests against a recent NER-based baseline, our method achieves more than twice the risk-adjusted alpha and shows significantly stronger predictive power. Qualitative analysis suggests that these gains stem from preserving contextual qualifiers and filtering out non-metric terms that keyword-based approaches often miss.
KVComm: Enabling Efficient LLM Communication through Selective KV Sharing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems, where effective inter-model communication is crucial. Existing communication protocols either rely on natural language, incurring high inference costs and information loss, or on hidden states, which suffer from information concentration bias and inefficiency. To address these limitations, we propose KVComm, a novel communication framework that enables efficient communication between LLMs through selective sharing of KV pairs. KVComm leverages the rich information encoded in the KV pairs while avoiding the pitfalls of hidden states. We introduce a KV layer-wise selection strategy based on attention importance scores with a Gaussian prior to identify the most informative KV pairs for communication. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and model pairs demonstrate that KVComm achieves comparable performance to the upper-bound method, which directly merges inputs to one model without any communication, while transmitting as few as 30\% of layers' KV pairs. Our study highlights the potential of KV pairs as an effective medium for inter-LLM communication, paving the way for scalable and efficient multi-agent systems.
LapSurgie: Humanoid Robots Performing Surgery via Teleoperated Handheld Laparoscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Robotic laparoscopic surgery has gained increasing attention in recent years for its potential to deliver more efficient and precise minimally invasive procedures. However, adoption of surgical robotic platforms remains largely confined to high-resource medical centers, exacerbating healthcare disparities in rural and low-resource regions. To close this gap, a range of solutions has been explored, from remote mentorship to fully remote telesurgery. Yet, the practical deployment of surgical robotic systems to underserved communities remains an unsolved challenge. Humanoid systems offer a promising path toward deployability, as they can directly operate in environments designed for humans without extensive infrastructure modifications -- including operating rooms. In this work, we introduce LapSurgie, the first humanoid-robot-based laparoscopic teleoperation framework. The system leverages an inverse-mapping strategy for manual-wristed laparoscopic instruments that abides to remote center-of-motion constraints, enabling precise hand-to-tool control of off-the-shelf surgical laparoscopic tools without additional setup requirements. A control console equipped with a stereo vision system provides real-time visual feedback. Finally, a comprehensive user study across platforms demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework and provides initial evidence for the feasibility of deploying humanoid robots in laparoscopic procedures.
Optimizing Fine-Tuning through Advanced Initialization Strategies for Low-Rank Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The rapid development of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods has noticeably improved the efficiency of adapting large language models. Among these, LoRA has gained widespread popularity due to its strong balance of effectiveness and parameter efficiency. However, LoRA relies on initializing two low-rank matrices whose product is zero, which limits its ability to effectively activate and leverage the original model weights-creating a potential bottleneck for optimal performance. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{IniLoRA}, a novel initialization strategy that initializes the low-rank matrices to closely approximate the original model weights. Experimental results indicate that IniLoRA achieves better performance than LoRA across a range of models and tasks. Additionally, we introduce two variants, IniLoRA-$α$ and IniLoRA-$β$, both leveraging distinct initialization methods to enhance performance further.
Cost Efficient Fairness Audit Under Partial Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

We study the problem of auditing the fairness of a given classifier under partial feedback, where true labels are available only for positively classified individuals, (e.g., loan repayment outcomes are observed only for approved applicants). We introduce a novel cost model for acquiring additional labeled data, designed to more accurately reflect real-world costs such as credit assessment, loan processing, and potential defaults. Our goal is to find optimal fairness audit algorithms that are more cost-effective than random exploration and natural baselines. In our work, we consider two audit settings: a black-box model with no assumptions on the data distribution, and a mixture model, where features and true labels follow a mixture of exponential family distributions. In the black-box setting, we propose a near-optimal auditing algorithm under mild assumptions and show that a natural baseline can be strictly suboptimal. In the mixture model setting, we design a novel algorithm that achieves significantly lower audit cost than the black-box case. Our approach leverages prior work on learning from truncated samples and maximum-a-posteriori oracles, and extends known results on spherical Gaussian mixtures to handle exponential family mixtures, which may be of independent interest. Moreover, our algorithms apply to popular fairness metrics including demographic parity, equal opportunity, and equalized odds. Empirically, we demonstrate strong performance of our algorithms on real-world fair classification datasets like Adult Income and Law School, consistently outperforming natural baselines by around 50% in terms of audit cost.
GuidedSampling: Steering LLMs Towards Diverse Candidate Solutions at Inference-Time
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Repeated Sampling (RS) is a simple inference-time algorithm that has been shown to improve model performance on complex tasks. Although it is an effective way of scaling inference time, it often struggles to generate diverse solution candidates, frequently relying on the same underlying approach to solve the problem and thus producing redundant samples. To address this limitation, we propose a new inference algorithm, GuidedSampling, which decouples the exploration and generation phases during inference, increasing diversity of generated candidate solutions. The exploration phase identifies multiple concepts that can be utilized to solve the problem, while the generation phase applies a specific concept to provide final solution candidates. We first define the theoretical bounds of GuidedSampling and then empirically demonstrate that it improves the performance of base model at pass@50 by on an average ~21.6% across various benchmarks compared to RS. Furthermore, models trained on trajectories of GuidedSampling exhibit substantial performance improvements at pass@5 by on an average ~9.7%, compared to models trained on traditional RS. Additionally, models trained with GuidedSampling increases the average number of concepts per instance (1.67 -> 3.03), yielding a diverse set of candidates than traditional RS.
Seeing the Bigger Picture: 3D Latent Mapping for Mobile Manipulation Policy Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

In this paper, we demonstrate that mobile manipulation policies utilizing a 3D latent map achieve stronger spatial and temporal reasoning than policies relying solely on images. We introduce Seeing the Bigger Picture (SBP), an end-to-end policy learning approach that operates directly on a 3D map of latent features. In SBP, the map extends perception beyond the robot's current field of view and aggregates observations over long horizons. Our mapping approach incrementally fuses multiview observations into a grid of scene-specific latent features. A pre-trained, scene-agnostic decoder reconstructs target embeddings from these features and enables online optimization of the map features during task execution. A policy, trainable with behavior cloning or reinforcement learning, treats the latent map as a state variable and uses global context from the map obtained via a 3D feature aggregator. We evaluate SBP on scene-level mobile manipulation and sequential tabletop manipulation tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that SBP (i) reasons globally over the scene, (ii) leverages the map as long-horizon memory, and (iii) outperforms image-based policies in both in-distribution and novel scenes, e.g., improving the success rate by 15% for the sequential manipulation task.